Monday, December 3, 2012

The worst ...

I'm just going to put this out there: If you were considering getting a tooth infection just to see what it feels like, I'd advise you to not. The past week of my life has been the most horrible week of my life. No joke. That's saying a lot because I saw Cloud Cult perform on Friday night -- after eating some pretty delicious pizza with roasted garlic -- which should have cancelled out some of the awfulness but it didn't because this is seriously the worst. The. Worst.

I'm also surprised that I have any friends left, because I haven't shut up about this pain for even five seconds. And at least two times per night I ask Chuck to rub the neck muscles that I've strained from wincing.

Also: I was combatting this with Penicillin for 5 days, which seemed really steampunk to me. That didn't work at all. I went to urgent care for a new antibiotic on Saturday. I want to say it's working better, but I once made the mistake of thinking "Oh, ok. Maybe this is working now" last week and whoa was I wrong.

I have a gland that is so swollen that it is like trying to swallow around a boulder. And that's one of the better parts of this. I am pretty sure there is a pill-shaped hole in my liver. My head hurts so bad I can't even touch my skull without setting off a new chain of pain. I like to wake myself (and my emergency contact) every two hours by screaming in the night.

FYI: Pain pills work for two hours at the most, but can only be taken every four to six hours. I try to cram as much fun into that two hours as is humanly possible. (Like this time I won a new Nike headband and ankle weights).

Anyway, here is what I've been up to in addition to hiding from bright lights and shrinking from loud noises.

MOVIESDark Horse The holy hell. An emotionally stunted, unhinged middle-aged man works for his dad, lives with his parents and meets a woman at a wedding and gets gaga about her. She's got Hep-B and a touch of depression and thinks, Meh. Why not marry him and have kids and make a family. Filled with weird little almost realistic fantasies and strange plot points. I think I liked it.

Safety Not GuaranteedA team from a Seattle magazine goes to a small resort town to write about this guy who wants a time-travel companion. Except, the companion they toss at him develops and actual fondness for him. And even though he's a little out there, he's not necessarily wrong about people tailing him. This is like "Garden State" if it had a schizophrenic male lead.

The Tall Man: Lots of twists in this scary plot about a once thriving town that died when the mines closed and now every so often a young kid goes missing. Super stupid. But also pretty unpredictable.

WATCHING ON THE INTERNET
"Maria Bamford's Special Special Special" is so great. She recorded a live performance in her living room in front of an audience of her parents. Like.

READING

Leaving the Atocha Stationby Ben Lerner: Adam Gordon is a poet who seems to hate poetry. He’s gotten himself a pretty sweet fellowship, a year-long stay in Spain with a project, that, when explained, rings sort of false. He’s got a flexible relationship with truth and suffers no shame for wiping spit under his eyes and pretending his mother has died to gain sympathy. There is no crisis of conscience when he takes a tragic story his friend tells and makes it his own meaningful tale. He’s also got a steady diet of white pills and spliffs and a fascination with what he looks like when he a) makes this face; b) scribbles in his notebook; c) is viewed from an airplane.

Man. The protagonist of Ben Lerner’s debut novel “Leaving the Atocha Station” is a serious weasel. Or, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he is just like everyone who regularly looks around, adjusts his underwear and wonders how the hell he has gotten away with this whole I’m-an-adult-and- people-assume-I-know-what-I’m-doing thing. Maybe he just seems like someone I would have accidentally dated in college because we, as a reader, have access to what he internalizes. Maybe he’s only a fraction of the asshole he thinks he is, the amount that is visible from the outside.